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Department of Architecture

 

Dr Ramit Debnath

Dr. Ramit Debnath is a university assistant professor and inaugural Cambridge Zero fellow at the University of Cambridge, and a visiting faculty at Caltech's Humanities and Social Sciences division and Cambridge Computer Laboratory.

Ramit leads the Cambridge Collective Intelligence & Design Group and in the steering committee of the Centre for Human-Inspired AI. He is currently the course director for MAUS; Director of Studies and a Title-A Fellow in Interdisciplinary Design at Churchill College.

He has a background in electrical engineering and an MPhil-PhD in computational social science as a Gates Scholar from Cambridge. For more info, see: camcid.github.io.

Biography

See here: https://camcid.github.io/people.html 

Research

My overarching objectives are to develop collective intelligence approaches using computational social science, machine learning and AI to provide a complex system-level understanding of barriers to climate action in the Anthropocene, their interactions, and how these translate to leverage points for policy and behavioural interventions. My research aims to incorporate the above data to design people-centric and just climate and sustainability action pathways.

Active research projects: https://camcid.github.io/projects.html

Publications

Key publications: 

Full list: https://camcid.github.io/publications.html

Debnath, R., Creutzig, F., Sovacool, B.K., and Shuckburgh, E. (2023). Harnessing human and machine intelligence for planetary-level climate action, npj Climate Action, Nature Portfolio. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44168-023-00056-3

Bardhan, R., Debnath, R., and Mukherjee, B. (2023). Factor in gender to beat the heat in impoverished settlements, Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02632-3

Debnath, R., Bardhan, R., and Bell, M.L., (2023) Lethal heatwaves are challenging India’s sustainable development, PLOS Climate.   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000156

Debnath, R., Reiner, D. M., Sovacool, B. K., Müller-Hansen, F., Repke, T., Alvarez, R. M., & Fitzgerald, S. D. (2023). Conspiracy spillovers and geoengineering. iScience, Cell Press, 106166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2023.106166 

Debnath, R., van der Linden, S., Sovacool, BK, and Alvarez, RM (2023) Facilitating system-level behavioral climate action using computational social science. Nature Human Behaviour.  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01527-7 

Debnath, R., Bardhan, R., Shah, D.U., Mohaddes, K., Ramage, M.H., Alvarez, RM., and Sovacool, BK (2022) Social media enables people-centric climate action in the hard-to-decarbonise building sector. Scientific Reports, Nature Publishing. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-23624-9  

Other publications: 

https://scholar.google.co.in/citations?user=eyp1rYEAAAAJ&hl=en

Teaching and Supervisions

Teaching: 

Design Tripos: Maths and Programming core modules

EMBA - Energy and Environment Modules (CJBS)

MPP - Fundamentals of ML (POLIS/BIPP)

Part-II B Environmental Design (Architecture)

Research Methods (MAUS)

MPhil in Engineering for Sustainable Development 

MSc Energy and Society (ECI, University of Oxford)

BSc/MSc Energy Systems (Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University)

 

Research supervision: 

I welcome research applications in the following domains:

  • Computational Social Science 
  • Environmental Data Science
  • Climate action and tipping points
  • Design thinking and just transition 
  • Human-in-the-loop AI design

More about my group here: https://camcid.github.io

Other Professional Activities

Professional Member - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Member - EDITS, IIASA

Departmental level - Chair of IT Committee; Website Liaison officer; Director of MAUS; Y3 dissertation coordinator, Feedback coordinator, Y2 Pecha Kulcha coordinator, Graduate Committee, DOS Committee, Outreach Committee, PhD Conference Chair, PhD 9th term reviewer.

University Assistant Professor
Course Director, MAUS
Cambridge Zero Fellow
Title-A Fellow, Churchill College

Contact us

 

Study at Cambridge

About the University

Research at Cambridge